WoW Tungsten

Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Another good result, 830,000 gold for the month. There’s
plenty of gold to be made despite competition being at an all-time high. This
month were seeing a few new players entering the market and competing for
market share. Is this just part of the Craziness that is Christmas?

Some old players are changing strategy too. Instead of
competing on 1 toon, they are using multiple toons to place Auctions more
frequently.

The Arbitrage Project works great going from Alliance to
Horde, but I’m finding it difficult to find enough items to send back from
Horde to Alliance. Dabbling in this with the highest priced items netted 85,000
profit without much effort. We’re talking Primal Diamonds, Belt Buckles, Shoulder
Enchants and Red Gems. Horde side on Caelestrasz is a much slower market, however
there seems to be less competition too. It will be interesting to see how this
plays out after Christmas when the kiddies go back to school.

GKP Runs

Woot! GKP runs are back on Caelestrasz Alliance. The first
one kicked off last week, which I couldn’t attend as I’ve been away since New
Year’s Day on Holidays, but this week I’m signed up and good to go. Finally
something to spend gold on other than items off the BMAH.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

1,261,169 gold for the month. Not only did we beat our previous PB (personal best) but we smashed the 1 million gold goal I set at the beginning of this expansion. Kinda scared now as I don’t have a long term goal in the works, and as I’ve said before, I need goals to stay motivated.

So what changed? We had been doing 600k ish then boom, 1.26 million. I attribute the jump to a few things.

Blizz released 2 more LFR’s this month, along with the raids instances.

More people hitting 90 and the ease to get into and complete heroics.

More guilds starting to raid.

Daily Quest Rep rewards from VP. Yes there are still people grinding out rep, can you believe it. I sure can.

Duping of Blood Spirits, means access to crafted gear is much easier.

Sales of Enchants, Gems, and Belt Buckles went through the roof. 952,630g profit from this alone.

190,000g sales from DM cards.

118,539g profit from Glyphs.

Our Routine

We buy as much Ghost Iron Ore & Green Tea Leaf as we can up to 1.75g each (35g a stack) on Caelestrasz

Prospect the Ore and make Ornate Rings & Shadowfire Pendants.

The Blue procs from the above, we try and sell on the AH, otherwise we DE along with the greens.

Buy Sha Crystals when cheap for the Rep Enchants if you can craft them.

Buy Living Steel when cheap and get BS Guildy to make into Buckles.

Mill Herbs and turn into Shoulder enchants if you have a Scribe.

Greater Crane Wing Inscription

Greater Ox Horn Inscription

Greater Tiger Claw Inscription

Greater Tiger Fang Inscription

Don’t be scared to move items to the opposite faction if prices are being tanked. As an experiment when I was looking into Arbitrage opportunities, I was moving Belt Buckles from Alliance to Horde and made 200g a pop.

Use the remote Auction House during the day if you have access to a computer.

Setup notifications on Wowuction.com or TSM Desktop App (link Below) to alert you to cheap mats.

Don’t be scared to buyout other peoples auctions to reset the price. We regularly do this with Primal Diamonds, Belt Buckles and Shoulder Enchants, when prices get tanked to sub cost prices or near to.

No 1 rule, in an undercutting war, try to always be the last man standing. Never let emotions drive you, always undercut by 1c (small amount) only, down to your break even point. If you drop the item value by 10-15g the only person you're hurting is yourself. If your competition posts more items or can stay on longer, it doesn’t matter, while you are on line be the aggressor. Make your competition work for every gold. Don’t stay up till 3am trying to win an undercutting war, walk away and get up fresh for a new round the next day. Persistence and repetition is the key. Learn to post and raid at the same time. 2 screens = win

You will need the following bags 2x Illusionary Bags, 1x Luxuious Silk Gem Bag, 1x Outherworldly Bag for the toon running Enchants, Gems & Buckles. We use the the Royal Scribe Satchels for Glyphs.

Though I hate doing Dailys, theres some I do every day. Tilers Rep, get it to revered and you can then plant Songbell seeds which turn into mote of Harmony when harvested. I’m doing this on 3 toons per day. Get your rep to Exalted and you can have 16 farms. Spirits of Harmony (SoH) can be exchanged for 3x Golden Lotus which is used by Alchemists to transmute gems, this is good for making up missing gems for Primal Diamonds, unless they are cheaper on the AH.

Although we do sell Leather Leg enchants, getting SoH is time consuming. I’ve tried to stay away from crafting anything that requires SoH. This is not to say that Crafted items are unprofitable, but more so, that getting the mats for them is a time sink.

Use your professional cool downs every day.

There are a lot of bloggers out there, some offer different ideas for gold making every day, some focus on 1 profession and are authorities in that area.

Twichie Enterprises is the main reason I provide monthly updates as I've always liked reading their blog, and the idea of giving readers an overall financial perspective, appeals to me.

This blog will never be a place for cutting edge ideas as I read other peoples blogs for those. It will however focus on the Shuffle and the how a team of 3 go about it.

Sunday, 18 November 2012

This is going to be the new project that the Consortium
team trials. We’re going to buy off one Auction house to sell on the other.
The minimum we intend to make is 35% mark-up excluding AH fees, but this % may
need to be a little flexible.

The neutral auction house is where this may grind to a halt.
If we get a camper/sniper then we won’t be able to transfer items between
factions, so the whole project becomes pointless until they leave.

The minimum an item can be sold for on the Neutral AH is 2
copper to minimise the 15% commission the neutral AH charges.

The Plan

We’re going to setup a toon on the Alliance & Horde side
with 1,000 gold each, they will buy cheap items off the Alliance AH to sell on
Horde side. We’ll transfer the items across, to our Horde toon and sell them.
We will then buy cheap Horde items and transfer them back to Alliance for
re-sale. We will then do the same again but investing profits.

The Rules

No crafting, we buy from the AH or Consortium Project
(better the gold stays in our pockets than competitors) at Auction House prices
for resale.

Example

Let’s say we purchased 1000g of items on Alliance, send to
neutral AH, transfer to Horde, Sell on Horde +35%, we lose 5% to AH fees but
should have 1300gish for re-investment, purchase goods, send to neutral AH,
transfer to Alliance, Sell on Alliance. Should have 1690gish for re-investment.

The Problem

By trips I mean the gold/goods go from Alliance to Horde to
Alliance again.

So after 14 trips we'll have 1.5 Million gold, right!Nope, after 9 trips it’s going to be hard to
find enough items on the either Horde or Alliance side to send back and forth for resale. It's going to slow down substantially at this point, but mathematically it looks
impressive.

I will setup the toons during the week and commence the
project when the new month for the Consortium Project starts.

The Tools

I’ve setup a spreadsheet on google docs if anyone wants to
try this out on their own realm. Please report any errors you find.

Sunday, 11 November 2012

There are many players in WoW who struggle to keep a few
thousand gold, I was one of those people once. I would go to raids with just
enough gold to cover repair bills, having just spent most of what I had on Gems
and Enchants. It frustrated me, not because I had no gold, but that I didn’t
have the knowledge to make gold, and the only avenue left was doing Dailys,
which I hated.

I resolved to find a way to make gold. I became a Glypher
and soon the gold started rolling in (back when I though 3k a day was a lot). I
set myself a goal to make 1 million gold. It took a long time to achieve my
goal, mainly because I now had the resources to purchase what I wanted. When a
new Tier of gear came out, I would purchase the latest BoE gear. Spending 30k
on a trinket wasn’t an issue, so for every two steps forward, I took one back.

At the beginning of Cata I had hit the previous Gold Cap on
a few toons and decided to make the push for 1 million gold. By half way
through the first tier of Cata I achieved it. But what happened next was
unexpected. I couldn’t bring myself to play WoW, I had lost all enthusiasm for
the game. Raiding was something I had always loved doing, but even that was
empty for me. I decided to take a break from the game.

Four months later I came back to WoW but my intention was to
only play PvP. I still did not have the enthusiasm I once had. I changed from
Horde to Alliance and started running BG’s. I also got back into making gold. This
is about the same time I started reading Critical Goblin’s blog.

What I saw there was a project which I could replicate on
Caelestrasz. My motivation was not to make gold, but to see what effect my
actions had on my competitors.

The Alliance Glyph market was dominated by 3-4 players at
the time, so for the next 3 months all I did was post glyphs walls. 2x @ 15g,
2x @ 20g and 2x @ 25g for 48 hrs.

Prior to me entering the market, glyphs sold at 100gish
each, so I wasn’t popular, as I received helpful advice as
to how to raise glyph prices from competitors. By the end of 3 months, one
consistent competitor remained in business, who seemed more than happy to
play the 15g glyph game.

What did I learn from this project……most people realised
that they are working for nothing/couldn’t compete and took a break from the
glyph market. The one remaining glypher, has a herber and despite the fact that
selling herbs would be more profitable, they had the mindset of “I will control
this market” and “I will not leave”. The most important lesson for me, was that
having a Project/goal is motivating, not the gold, I got my enthusiasm back for
WoW.

As I said in last month Consortium Update, one of my goals is
to reach 1,000,000 gold profit in a month. Based on our profit to date this
month I can see that this goal will be achieved very soon, maybe even this
month. I need a new Project/Goal and I’m open to ideas. Furthermore I’m feeling
evil so the more mischievous the goal the better. Tung needs your Ideas now
before he looses his motivation.

Wednesday, 31 October 2012

We’ve had a really good month as it turned out. I didn’t
think it would be the case half way through the month. We close off our month
on the last Sunday of each month, this allows us to always restock, so we
include all the costs for achieving the profit.

That being said, prior to MoP we were purchasing a lot of
materials cheap with the expectation that there would be huge inflation upon
release. This month we are seeing the benefits of those decisions. I use the
term Sales below because a lot of costs were incurred in the previous month,
which aren’t deducted this month to work out profit.

We were also farming a lot of our own herbs for DM Cards and the value of the herbs isn't being taken into account.

Total Profit of 632,067 gold for the month, which is a new
record for the Consortium Project.

We backed a winner on Netherweave & Embersilk Cloth,
our sales this month were 53,263 gold from bags. That’s a lot of bags. We are
getting 20-25g for Nehterweave Bags & 300-350g for Embersilk Bags.

Enchanting Mats

I am only now, considering selling all the enchanting mats I
purchased cheap prior to MoP, which we have a lot of. It’s taken a while for
all the excess stock of my competitors to be used up.

Inks

Again we backed a winner, buying out all the cheap Whiptail
and turning them into Inks has worked out brilliantly. We still using up all
the stock we exchanged, and have approximately 3 months supply sitting in storage. This is a
great advantage now that Herb prices are through the roof. Glyph Sales accounted for 136,196 gold.

Darkmoon cards

I did a post DarkmoonFaire Fail. The fail part was referring to Blizzards failure to change the Ink
vendor when MoP went live. I didn’t communicate this particularly well so some
readers misconstrued my meaning which I apologise for. Sales accounted for 158,000 in DM Cards.

But maybe the title was a premonition of what was to come, not naming
anybody, but someone in the consortium project put up a Tanking DM card on the AH for 300g,
instead of 30,000 gold and blamed TSM for the glitch. Moral of the story check
your high price posts before you walk away from the AH. Needless to say some
tank is a happy camper today.

Enchants (Legs, Shoulders & regular Enchants), Gems
& Belt Buckles

Profit on this was 284,608.

Having 3 Alchemists making belt buckles (2 Transmutation
Masters) meant we were able to make 3+ per day of Living Steel. I was also purchasing a lot of
Living Steel off the AH, thus keeping the price high. A mate turned these into
Belt Buckles for us and they sold really well.

Enchants are now selling really well, took a while for
people to level to 90 and start doing heroics.

Gems, Ring & Necklaces

I’m baffled why people would sell Gems & Flasks at below
cost. I thought that Golden Lotus would set the price of Gems and Flasks but
that doesn’t seem to be the case currently. Maybe it’s because with Exalted Tillers
rep people are able to make 1.6 Spirit of Harmony per day and exchange them for
Golden Lotus. Maybe demand is still rising for Gems & Flasks but sometime
soon prices have to reset. I didn’t start selling gems until late in the month.
Rings and Necklaces have sold really well. I even sold a Sapphire Panther for a
nice 4k Profit.

Flasks are great on Raid Nights but early in the week, that
are pretty dead. I had to revise my notion on buying out Golden Lotus to 300g and selling heaps of flasks, there just isn’t
demand.

MoP Goals

One of my goals for this expansion is to make 1,000,000 in a
month. For that to be a reality prior to
Blizzard making Mote/Spirit of Harmony tradable, I’m going to have to level up my JC &
Enchanter on Horde side in preparation. Get ready Horde, here comes the pain.

Saturday, 27 October 2012

It relates to a blue post from Blizz talking about the
possibly of introducing a Cross Realm Auction House (CRAH) and the effect on
the economy this feature would have.

By combining the action houses, there would be greater
Supply of items but there’d be greater demand too.

Demand drives prices, when there is an oversupply of something;
Sellers are forced to reduce prices to sell their items. The price falls till
enough Buyers enter the market to purchase the items.

Under a CRAH environment there would be a constant influx of
items for sale. A Buyer could almost be guaranteed to find an item they were
looking for on the AH.The Raw materials
for all professions would be undercut constantly in an attempt to be the
cheapest. This is great for Buyers but Sellers would be in constant
competition. Margins would be cut to the point that the average wow player
would be selling at cost.

My main reservations to the introduction of a CRAH would be as
follows.

Gold Sellers

One of the tricks gold sellers
use to distribute gold is to have the buyer (once they’ve paid for the gold)
put 5 stacks of Linen Cloth for example on the AH for a ridiculous price, then
the gold supplier buys it out, and 30 mins later you have your gold. The Gold
Seller wears the AH fee so let’s say you purchased 5000 gold, you would put up
5x items at 1050 gold (5x1000g + 5% AH fee). You receive 5000g in the mail.

A CRAH would mean that Gold Sellers would no
longer have to be on multiple realms. They could distribute huge amount of gold
from one Server.

Remember the duping of Queen’s Garnet in
Cata, when the next exploit is found by the Gold Sellers, the CRAH would be a
license to make gold for re-distribution.

In the meantime all those Low population
servers can expect a growth of Bots to supply the CRAH with mats.

PvE & PvP Realms

I hate being ganked that’s why I
play on a PvE Realm. It provides the added benefit of being able to explore
Horde dominated areas to gather materials without interruption. There would be a distinct advantage of being
on a PvE realm for Gatherers to make gold, if a CRAH were introduced.

Volume
& UI

I’m sure we’ve all experience the person
who puts up 1000 pieces of Cloth in single units on the AH. I always find this
slows down the Auction house considerably, which is probably the primary
motivation of the seller. I use an addon called Auctionator to search for items
on the AH and when the above occurs, I find that Auctionatorgrinds to a halt. The main reason I use
Auctionator is because I dislike the way the Blizzard UI shows what’s on the
AH. If a Cross Realm Auction House were introduced unless something is done to
the UI, I believe the AH wouldn’t cope with the quantity of Auctions.

Trying to use the Blizzard UI to buy items
off the AH, is an exercise in frustration. Selling items is even more of an
ordeal. In 10 years, Blizz have made no effort to make the UI any more user
friendly, but have incorporated a No. of other Addons into the game, as
features.

I say, fix the current AH UI before you go
experimenting with Cross Realm AH's.

Competition

My biggest competition are the no-lifer’s
(could be Gold Sellers) who sit on the Auction House 24/7, (Some would say I’m
one). These people undercut constantly and dominate an area of the AH. A CRAH
would only promote this sort of behaviour, especially by gold sellers. I've got enough competition on 1 server let alone Cross realms.

My opinion of the CRAH is that it would be a
huge mistake on Blizzards behalf to try and facilitate this feature. Don't fix what isn't broken.

Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Gathering Professions can be very lucrative for gold making
especially at the beginning of the expansion. If you’re going to be spending
any serious time gathering (Minig or Herbing), then I suggest you hit up your
local Engineer for some Mist-Piercing Goggles .
They increase the number of nodes you see by about 10%.These Goggles do not need to be equipped, just
put them in your bags and carry on Gathering normally. The extra nodes appear
with a sort of mist around them.

The other item that will be in high demand is the ForagersGloves
which drop off a rare spawn Korda Torras in Kun-Lai Summit. These gloves increase the
speed which youMine/Herbnodes in
Pandaria. They reduce the gathering time by up to 1.5 seconds, down to a
minimum of .5 seconds. These gloves will need to be equipped unlike the above. My
Alliance Druid (Herbalist) & Worgan Hunter (Mining) both want these
bad……time to camp Toras me thinks.

One of my goals for MoP was to keep track of the Gold per
Hour (GpH) that Gatherers could achieve.

When I first entered Jade Forest and
saw all the Mining Nodes and Green Tea Leaf that abounds, I thought I would
have to look no further that this area.

Now Ghost Iron Ore nodes stick out because they are white, but I find
Green Tea Leaf to be a pain to find, the nodes being green and all. I end up
flying around trees looking for the sparkle of the node which slows my farming.

Fortunately Fool’s Cap is a better choice currently, as
I can get almost double the price of Green Tea Leaf on the AH, and I can see
the herbs easily.

Mining - Ghost Iron ore - Jade Forest

I spent 30 mins following this path around Jade Forest. In
that time I collected 20 stacks of Ghost Iron Ore

Ghost Iron Ore is selling for 3g50s each currently

GPH 2,800

Herbalism - Fool's Cap - Dread Wastes

I spent 30 Mins flying around Dread Wastes collecting Fool’s
Cap. I collected 20.5 Stacks. This area is so small that if there are any more
than 2 people farming this area at the same time, then your GpH will drop
significantly.

Fool’s Cap is selling for 5g75s each.

GPH 4,715

Skinning - Valley of the Four Winds

I don’t have a Skinner so Humph and I farmed WyrmhornTurtles in
Valley of the Four Winds on our Hunters.

We did this twice, the first time I was paying attention to
drop quantities however the last time the spawn rate of the Turtles had dropped
significantly. Confirmed by wowhead comments, thanks Blizz.

I want to have another crack at this area this weekend, to revise my data.

Despite the nerf, what I liked about this area is that it gave Exotic Leather, Motes of Harmony, Prismatic Scales, uncommon items, and Raw Turtle Meat which is used for Feasts.